by Rich Larson
I can sense him wavering. He’s looking down at the pod, looking at his reflection in the shiny black mirror of it. I feel guilty in my gut, but I push right through, because this is important, getting this deal, and he’ll thank me later.
“You owe it to us,” I say. “Your dad’s in the washroom. You know what he’s doing in there?”
Oxford looks up, startled. Nods.
“Hacking up blood,” I say. “He’s never going to run again. Not how he used to. You don’t think he’d like a chance to feel that again? To hit the break? To get out for that big dunk in transition, pound up the hardwood, slice right to the rack, drop the bomb like wham.” I clap my hands together and Oxford flinches a bit. “You owe it, man,” I say. “You owe it to your dad. He got you here, didn’t he? He got you all this way.”
And that’s when Diallo senior comes out of the washroom, and I couldn’t have done it any better if I choreographed it myself, because he staggers a bit against the wall and looks suddenly old, suddenly tired. Oxford looks at him, looks scared as hell. Maybe realizing, for the first time, that his pa won’t be around forever.
I reach as high as I can and put my hand on his shoulder. “You know the right call, yeah?”
He hesitates, then slowly nods, and I want to bite off my tongue but I tell myself it’s worth it. Tell myself the both of them will thank me later.
Supper is quiet. Oxford is obviously still thinking about what I said, stealing odd glances over at his pa, and his pa is trying to figure out what’s going on without actually asking. It’s a relief for everyone, I think, when the oysters are finished and we head back outside.
The Seattle sky’s gone dark and the air is a bit nippy. Oxford’s pa pulls on a pair of gloves while we wait for the autocab. When it pulls up, Oxford announces he’s not ready to head back to the hotel yet. He wants to shoot.
“Yeah, alright,” I say. “Can head back to the gym. Got it rented for the whole day.”
“No,” Oxford says. “Somewhere outside.”
So we end up doing loops through the downtown until GPS finds an outdoor court at some Catholic school ten minutes away. There’s no one else there when we show up, and the court has one of those weird rubbery surfaces, but Oxford doesn’t seem to mind. He zips off his trackies and digs his ball out of his duffel.
His pa keeps the gloves on to feed him shots, moving him around the arc, hitting him with nice crisp passes right in the shooting pocket. You can tell that this whole thing, this whole tableau, with him under the net and Oxford catching, shooting, catching, shooting, is something they’ve done a million times on a million nights. The bright white floodlights make them into long black silhouettes. Neither of them talk, but little puffs of steam come out of Oxford’s mouth as he moves.
I watch from the chain-link fence, leaning back on it. Oxford’s form is still smooth levers and pistons, but when I get a glimpse of his face I can see he is not smiling how he smiled in the gym. I manage to lock eyes with him, and I give him a nod, then give him some privacy by walking down to the other end of the court. I hear him start talking to his pa in what my audio implant tells me is Serer.
I’m thinking the contract is as good as signed, and I’m about to tell as much to my boss when the ball slams into the chain-link fence, sending ripples all down the length. I turn to see Oxford’s pa shrugging off his orange jacket, face tight and livid mad. He looks right at me, the sort of look you give something stuck to the bottom of your bomb-as-fuck shoe, then turns to his son.
“You think I cannot remember what it feels like to run?” he says. “You pity me?”
Oxford shakes his head desperately, saying something in Serer again, but his pa is not listening.
“We will play, then,” he says, and I get that he’s talking in English so I’ll understand. “You beat me, you can get the mesh surgery. Yes?”
“I did not want . . .” Oxford trails off. He stares at me, confused, then at his pa, hurt.
“It will be easy,” Diallo senior says. “I am old. I have bad lungs.” He scoops the ball off the pavement and fires it into Oxford’s chest. His son smothers it with his big hands but still has to take a step back, maybe more from the surprise than from the impact.
Oxford puts it on the floor and reluctantly starts his dribble. “Okay,” he says, biting at his lips again. “Okay.”
But he sleepwalks forward and his pa slaps the ball away, way quicker than I would have thought possible. Diallo senior bullies his son back into the post, hard dribble, fake to the right and then a short sharp jump hook up over his left shoulder. It’s in the net before Oxford can even leave his feet.
They’re playing make it take it, or at least Oxford’s pa is. He gets the ball again and bangs right down to another post-up, putting an elbow into Oxford’s chest. Oxford stumbles. The same jump hook, machine precision, up and in. The cords swish.
“I thought you want it now,” Diallo senior says. “I thought you want your mesh.”
Oxford looks stricken, but he’s not looking over at me anymore. He’s zeroed in. The next time his pa goes for the hook, he’s ready for it, floating up like an astronaut and slapping the shot away hard. Diallo senior collects it in the shadows, brings it back, but the next time down on the block goes no better. Oxford pokes the ball away and dribbles it back to the arc, near enough to me that I can hear a sobbing whine in his throat. I remember that he’s really still a kid, all seven feet of him, and then he drills the three-pointer with his pa’s hand right in his face.
And after that it’s an execution. It’s Oxford darting in again and again breathing short angry breaths, sometimes stopping and popping the pull-up jumper, sometimes yanking it all the way to the rack. He’s almost crying. I don’t know if they’re playing to sevens, or what, but I know the game is over when Oxford slips his pa on a spin and climbs up and under from the other side of the net, enough space to scoop in the finger roll nice and easy, but instead his arm seems to jack out another foot at least, impossibly long, and he slams it home hard enough that the backboard shivers. He comes down with a howl ripped out of his belly, and the landing almost bowls his pa over, sends him back staggering.
Diallo senior gathers himself. Slow. He goes to pick up the ball, but suddenly his grimace turns to a cough and he doubles over. The rusty wracking sound is loud in the cold air and goes on forever. Oxford stands there frozen, panting how he never panted in the gym, staring at his pa, and I stand there frozen staring at both of them. Then Diallo senior spits up blood in a ragged parabola on the sticky blue court, and his son breaks the frieze. He stumbles over, wraps his arms around him.
A call from my boss blinks onto my retinal, accompanied by a sample from one of the latest blip-hop hits. It jangles back and forth across my vision while I stand there like a statue. Finally, I cancel the call and take a breath.
“You don’t have to sign right away,” I say.
Oxford and his pa both look up, remembering I’m there. I shouldn’t be.
“You can think about it,” I stammer, ashamed like I’ve never been. “More. About the contract.”
I want to tell them to forget the contract. Forget the mesh. We’ll make you famous without it. But instead I skulk away, out through the cold metal gate, leaving the Diallos huddled there under the floodlight, breathing a single cloud of steam.
THE GHOST SHIP ANASTASIA
The bioship hung in orbit, tendrils extended, like a desiccated squid. Silas watched it grow larger each day from the viewport in the cryohold, where he went to be alone with Haley’s body and get high.
First he would inject himself with a mild euphoria virus and wait until the sight of her unmoving face no longer shredded him, until he could remind himself that her neural patterns were saved and she wasn’t dead, not quite, not yet.
Then he would get his viola and go sit cross-legged at the viewport, watching the semi-organic spaceship they’d been sent to retrieve. Their own ship had woken them up four days out from contact: first
Io, slight, dark-haired, with venom spurs implanted in her thumbs from her mercenary days, then Yorick, sallow-faced but handsome in retro suit and tie, the company man, and then Silas, failed concert violist and AI technician.
But not Haley, hardware/wetware specialist and Silas’s sister, because at some point in the past six months of cryo, a micrometeorite had slipped the heat shield, drilled through the hold, and made a miniscule crack in the circuitry arraying her berth. By the time the ship’s AI spotted the damage, her nervous system was collapsing in on itself. Silas wanted to remember the last time he’d hugged her, but cryo had a way of churning memories together.
So Io and Yorick left him to bathe his brain in chemicals and play music, for which Silas was dimly grateful. They were more concerned with the bioship. It was a mining craft, chartered through Dronyk Orbital, and the first of its breed: flesh-and-fungi carapace grown over alloy skeleton, fusing metal and meat together in a deep-space capable vessel that looked to Silas like an enormous spiny cephalopod. And all of it directed, through organic nerves and artificial conduits, by an AI that had stopped sending updates nearly seven months ago.
Silas was already composing dirges, so he started on one for the bioship’s crew, too. His viola had survived storage, its deadwood as smooth and gleaming as when it was freighted from the petrified forests on Elysium. Haley had paid for half of it. The last few notes were dissolving in the recycled air when he realized Io was beside him.
“You’re not going in there high,” she finally said. “We need you sharp.”
“I’ll be sharp,” Silas said. “I’ll be a razor drawn across an eyeball. A cloud bisecting a gibbous moon.”
“You saying shit like that, Silas, is what worries me.” Io held out one pale hand. “Give me your gear. The needle, the euphoria. All of it.”
Silas stared at her open palm. It had lost its callus in cryo, but he knew she would still have no problem taking his gear by force. Yesterday, six months ago, he saw her break the fingers of the cryo attendant who brushed them against her ass. He’d found it slightly frightening, and also climbed into his pod with half an erection.
That seemed grotesque, now that Haley was not-quite-dead.
“What do you think happened?” he asked, handing over his syringe and the last incubated petri canister. “To the bioship.”
“Fuel leak, navigation failure, your guess is as good as mine,” Io said. “But the thing’s a cyborg. So the problem could be wetware, could be software, could be hardware. I guess we should hope it’s . . . Software.” Her eyes flickered to Haley’s pod and her voice softened incrementally on the last word. “Sorry.”
“It’s alright,” Silas said on automatic. It wasn’t.
“Get some sleep, Silas. We’re a day out from contact.”
“I’ll sleep.”
Io hesitated, then put her hand on his. Through the euphoria haze, Silas felt a lazy jolt go up his spine, felt his heart thrum.
“She’s not dead,” Io said. “As soon as we get back planetside, Dronyk’s insurance will hire the best psychosurgeons. The very best. Get her straightened out and uploaded to a droid while the clone grows.”
The longer Haley was stored in the ship’s computer, the more she deteriorated. Chances of full personality recovery from a neural imprint would drop to near zero in the six months it would take to reach Jubilation. They called them ghosts for a reason.
Silas felt his high coming down. He removed her hand, careful for the modified thumb. “Of course.”
Io gave him one last look, then turned and disappeared into the gloom. Silas raised his bow, notched his viola, and started to play.
Eighteen hours later they were tethered to the bioship, sealed airlock-to-airlock in a bruising kiss. Yorick was already in his baggy radsuit when Silas showed up sweating from the fever that had burned out the last dregs of his euphoria virus. Silas wondered again whose significant other the company man had fucked to get sent off on a shit-show retrieval mission.
Yorick stopped fiddling with his faceplate to catch Silas staring at him. “Recreational narcotic use is in direct violation of your Dronyk personnel contract,” he said. “You look like some sort of junkie.”
Silas stepped into his radsuit. “Send me the reprimand, bitch.”
Yorick stiffened, his beetle-black eyes narrowing. “You shouldn’t have even been able to get that . . . substance . . . onboard.”
“It was in my rectum. Way up there.”
Yorick shook his head in disgust. Silas sealed his radsuit and then they ran the scanner wand over each other in silence. No blips, no tears. Io joined them a second later, having given final instructions to the ship’s freethinker.
“Should be nice and warm when we get back,” she said, checking down the sight of a sonic rifle. She caught Silas’s perturbed look. “Just a precaution, Silas. I don’t like boarding blind.”
Silas nodded. Three days ago he’d stolen the rifle from the storeroom, assembled it via pirated training tutorials, and held it up under his chin until his hands shook. He hoped she couldn’t tell. Io spread her arms cruciform and Yorick stepped up at once to scan her. He did it slowly, almost tenderly, in a way that made Silas strangely furious.
On Io’s signal their airlock shuttered open with a clockwork whisper of sliding polyglass and composite, leaving them facing a puffy brown sphincter. The bioship’s airlock spat up some insulatory mucus before the bioluminescent nodes in its flesh pulsed a welcoming orange.
“Christ,” Io muttered, crackling onto the radsuit comm channel, then plowed through with her left boot leading. Yorick followed suit in clumsier fashion. Silas held his breath on instinct, even though his hood was sealed and he was sucking on recycled air, as he prised the airlock apart and slithered through. The flesh squeezed and slid and left him with a glistening coat of mucus when he was reborn on the other side.
The bioship’s interior was dark and damp. They switched their halogens on one by one, harsh white light carving through the gloom. Silas saw more of the orange bioluminescence coming to life in response. The metal spine of the corridor floor was all but swallowed by rubbery brown meat.
“New growth,” Io said. “That’s not right. It should have gone dormant.”
Silas stared up at the ceiling and realized that the wrinkled flesh was moving, subtly. A slow, regular undulation. Almost a heartbeat. His stomach rolled.
“Let’s hit the bridge,” Io said. “Check on the cryo banks while Silas cracks the freethinker.”
Hologram blossomed from the floor and as she charted a route Silas gestured back towards the sphincter. “Way up there,” he said.
“You’re not amusing,” Yorick snapped back.
“No side chatter, shitheads,” Io said. “We’re on the clock.”
It felt like they were inside a monster. Silas could see only swatches of metal and cabling; mostly everything was covered over in quivering meat. Biomass. Where the corridor narrowed Silas bit down his claustrophobia, keeping his eyes on the blue-green of his oxygen meter. He didn’t breathe easy until the passage finally opened up into the domed bridge, where the cold metal control panels reminded him he was on a mining craft and not being digested. The star maps and displays were inert, but Silas’s eyes traced the cabling and found the freethinker. It was a burnished hump snaked with circuitry and half enveloped by the bioship’s growth. Recognizable, though, and the interface was lit blue, active.
“Ready and waiting for you,” Io said. “Let us know when you’re in.”
Silas nodded, unhooking the smart glove from his radsuit. The device molded to the shape of his hand with a series of clicks and clacks, brandishing needle-thin probes and flexing sensors. Io and Yorick disappeared down the droptube to the cryobank, leaving him alone with the hulking freethinker. Better that way. He didn’t want to find any more frozen corpses.
Silas pressed his hand up against the interface. Static screamed into his ears and eyes. He jerked back with a curse.
�
�What is it?” Io asked in his radsuit.
“Nothing,” Silas said. “Dirty in here. Nobody’s been, you know, maintaining.”
“No shit.”
“How’s the cryobank look?” Silas asked, adjusting the dampers on his glove.
“Cracking the first one now.”
Silas heard a grunt, then the gurgle of sluicing fluids and the hiss of a pod coming open. Silence.
“This one’s empty.” Io’s voice crackled. “Find the cryo record, Silas.”
Silas readied himself. This was not a healthy freethinker. That much was glaring. He plugged in with his dampers on full, and found himself in a mist of code. Systems were running slant-wise. Protocols were blinkered red, falling apart. Through it all, a spiky vein of mutation, coiling through core files and throttling monitor programs. He searched for the cryobank.
“A bioship can’t grow without feed,” Yorick’s voice came, accompanied by the gurgle and hiss of another pod. “All this fresh mass . . . These empty pods . . .”
Silas heard it dimly; he was immersed. The freethinker’s personality module was bloated. Immense. He reached for it.
“Oh, shit.” Io’s voice, taut. “Oh, shit. Silas, please tell me they launched a fucking lifeboat.”
But Silas was prodding the personality module, running his virtual feelers over it, even as his subconscious processed the conversation and cold clawed up his spine.
“It ate them,” Yorick said, and in the same instant the module unfurled under Silas’s touch like a star going supernova.
Electric current sizzled through his radsuit with a cooking fat hiss. Even insulated, Silas’s teeth knocked together and he spasmed, flopping away from the interface, blinking through reams of corrupt code. Then he was spread vitruvian on the deck, staring upward as the firefly lights of the star map flickered to life.